So our cars will be designed by AI now?

GM is letting AI design its cars now

GM said today it now takes one designer less than a day to turn a sketch into a photoreal car animation. That used to take three teams several months. Makes me worry about how this is going to affect safety measures, but anyways.

They built a virtual wind tunnel where the sculptor and the aerodynamicist work on the same model at the same time. The clay-and-engineering back-and-forth that used to eat two weeks is gone.

Detroit’s panic makes sense when you keep in mind that BYD ships a new car every 18 months. GM and Ford still need three to five years.

Stellantis cut a Microsoft deal in April to push AI through sales and product validation. Ford runs it through dealer training and fleet telematics. Everyone’s using AI in ways we didn’t think of before, but does it remind you of anything?

Every Big Three exec now says some version of "augment and accelerate, versus replace," which is what executives always say about six months before the layoffs (Sorry GM engineers!).

This looks like an arms race against China. Detroit is racing AI to catch up to a country that already ships cheaper, faster and increasingly better cars. Beyond the jobs question, Detroit is losing the speed race against China, and AI is the catch-up move that may already be too late.

Try Lorka AI

GenAI.Works Crowdfunding Round is Live

Many of you have been part of GenAI Works from the beginning. What started as AI content is now a $2M+ revenue business with strong growth:

2.4x annual revenue growth

300+ paying customers (NVIDIA, Google, IBM, ElevenLabs)

14M+ audience driving distribution

Now we’re entering the next stage, which is building our own AI products. GenAI Academy already has 30K users, our 9 hackathons drew 28K participants and led us to build the Hackathon App, and ToneUp powers our 14M+ content machine.

We’ve now opened a crowdfunding round to scale product development and expansion.

Invest until July 1 and earn up to 25% extra shares.

In making an investment decision, investors must rely on their own examination of the issuer and the terms of the offering, including the merits and risks involved. Genai Works, Inc. has filed a Form C with the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with its offering, a copy of which may be obtained here.

Microsoft’s CEO heads into Musk vs Altman

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been subpoenaed to testify in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. Musk's lawyers want him because Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest backer and signed off on the corporate restructuring Musk is trying to undo in court.

We’ve been following Elon’s moves for years, which is nothing to brag about since he’s the richest person on the planet, but have you noticed a pattern?

When Elon can't outbuild a rival, he sues or he buys.

Twitter (oh, sorry, it’s X now) was the buy and OpenAI is the lawsuit.

What he's actually after is a board seat or a structural reframing and a federal judge is unlikely to hand him either.

Nadella has spent two years trying to keep Microsoft's OpenAI investment out of governance headlines. That isn't going to work anymore.

On the witness stand, the cross-examination will move past Musk's grievances to what Microsoft knew during the November 2023 board crisis, what Sam Altman told them and how a board fires its CEO over a weekend and then unfires him after the largest investor makes a few phone calls. Microsoft's lawyers know what's coming. The rest of us get to watch.

OpenAI offers EU regulators access to its cybersecurity features

The European Commission said Monday it has welcomed an offer from OpenAI to provide open access to its cybersecurity features, and that Anthropic has not yet gone so far. Spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the Commission has received OpenAI's offer, while its four or five meetings with Anthropic have not yet involved any discussion on access to its AI models.

Former British finance minister George Osborne, who heads OpenAI's "OpenAI for Countries" initiative, sent an explanatory letter to the Commission and member states.

Through the "OpenAI EU Cyber Action Plan," Osborne said OpenAI will work with European policymakers, institutions and businesses by democratizing access to defensive tools that trusted actors can use to strengthen shared security, support public safety and reflect European priorities.

Tool of the Day: Drafted

Drafted is an AI floor plan generator that turns rough constraints (rooms, sizes, square footage) into multiple downloadable house plans with matching 3D exterior renders in seconds.

It targets homeowners, renovators and builders who would otherwise pay an architect five figures and sit through 10 to 12 rounds of client feedback.

Try this yourself:

Go to drafted.ai and start a new plan from the homepage.

Set your constraints: rooms, room sizes and total square footage.

Drafted generates multiple floor plan options with matching 3D exterior visuals in seconds.

Open any plan and click into segmented rooms to adjust sizes and counts. The core layout proportions stay locked while you iterate.

Generate furnished floor renders, then export to CAD when you've landed on a version you like.

Light Bytes

Investors are pricing Alphabet to retake the most-valuable-company crown from Nvidia, two years after the same trade had Google written off as the AI loser.

A Claude Code engineer published evidence that markdown wastes tokens and degrades agent output, yet every agent framework still defaults to it anyway.

Greece is debating whether to add AI rights and obligations to its constitution, which would make it the first EU country to put model governance in a founding document.

Australia is testing AI on environmental impact reviews to clear its housing approvals backlog, which developers will love and environmental scientists are already writing op-eds against.

Mitsubishi proved you can update a satellite's AI from the ground, and "detecting illegal fishing" is the polite cover for what defense ministries are actually paying for.